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GCOS Essential Climate Variables (ECV) Terrestial/ECV T9 - Land Cover (including vegetation type) Land cover concerns the spatial distribution of physical cover including vegetation types and human uses of land for living, agriculture and forestry, and commercial space. Land cover affects and is affected by global climate change in important ways. First, the interaction of land cover and the atmosphere causes a regulation of the hydrologic cycle and energy budget, which makes it necessary for weather and climate prediction. Land cover also plays a major role in the carbon cycle by acting as a source and a sink of carbon. Deforestation, aforestation, and re-growth cause the release and sequestering of carbon, thereby affecting atmospheric CO2 concentration and the strength of the greenhouse effect (GCOS 2004, Masek 2001). Also, because regional climate conditions are a main determinant of vegetation types, changes in vegetation and land cover may indicate that climate change is occurring (GCOS 2004). Finally, land cover is a useful indicator because many climate-related variables that are difficult to measure at the global level, such as surface roughness, can be inferred in part from vegetation and land surface types; thus, land cover can be used to infer other important climate variables (GCOS 2003).
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